Upcoming Events
No upcoming events
Past Events
Reinscribing Land: Mike MacDonald's medicine and butterfly garden
Presented by Entomological Society of Canada and Entomological Society of Ontario
November 2021
More information coming soon.
Mike Macdonald’s Butterfly Garden Panel Discussion
Organized by Art Gallery of Alberta and Ociciwan Collective
July 26, 2021
Mike Macdonald’s Butterfly Garden Panel Discussion was a conversation between Lisa Myers, curator and artist, Becca Taylor, Director of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, and Catherine Crowston, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta. This program looked at the legacy of the late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald whose pollinator gardens continue to inspire and be a space for community contemplation and knowledge sharing.
Beyond the Buzz: Examining Bees Through an Interdisciplinary Lens "Bees, Land & Food Justice"
Organized by Centre for Bee Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
June 4, 2021
Bees, food, land and people are in close relationships which have been altered by past and present capitalist and colonial practices. This panel discussion was joined by Dr Sheila Colla (York University Assistant Professor), Dr Adrianne Lickers Xavier (Acting Director Indigenous Studies Program at MacMaster University), and Dr Sarah Rotz (York University Assistant Professor). Together, they examined the connections between de-colonized and equitable food systems with pollinator conservation.
MIIJIM: Indigenous Food Sovereignties
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
October 6, 2020
This conversation will bring together Secwepemc artist, curator and co-creator of Bush Gallery Tania Willard in conversation with Dawn Morrison (Secwepemc), Founder and Research Curator of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, and Mi’kmaw professor and Indigenous land and food justice advocate Sherry Pictou, to consider their work in defence of Indigenous sovereignties, and in relation to the reclamation of land, medicines, foods and plants. This conversation was opened by York University’s elder Amy Desjarlais.
MIIJIM: Indigenous and Black Food Relations
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
October 20, 2020
This conversation opens up the decades of work by Cree scholar Dr. Priscilla Settee in Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Leticia Ama Deawuo’s work at Black Creek Community Farm and her personal research on food history connecting with her grandmother and African Indigenous foods. The speakers will discuss the intersections of climate change and food injustice and its effects on Black and Indigenous people, while sharing the strengths of working in solidarity across communities.
MIIJIM: Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Food Systems
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
November 10, 2020
Considering that food systems are specific to cultures, nations and territories, this conversation brings together medicine and food scholars Joe Pitawanakwat from Wikwemikong First Nation, William Kingfisher from Rama First Nation and Chandra Maracle from Six Nations of the Grand River, to consider this specificity and to add nuance and complexity to the potentially flattening term “Indigenous food system.”
MIIJIM: Migrant Workers and Food Justice
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
November 24, 2020
This conversation is grounded in artistic practices that raise important considerations of labour and living conditions of those workers who grow the food that fills the grocery stores. We will bring together activist and advocate Evelyn Encalada, and workers rights organizer and community artist Tzazna Maranda to consider their calls to action through art and activism.
MIIJIM: Food and Gardens as Remediation
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
February 2, 2021
This conversation brings together Indigenous artists who are using seeds, planting and cultivation in their practices. T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss (Skwxwú7mesh / Stó:lō / Hawaiian / Swiss) and Anne Riley (Cree / Dene) will discuss A Constellation of Remediation, a project that includes the planting of Indigenous remediation gardens on vacant and untended lots on the unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəyə̓m (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Cease and Anne will be in conversation with Joce Two Crows Tremblay (Mohawk / Pottawatomi / Francaise / Ashkenazi), an artist, Earthworker and member of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, who will be sharing their work with the Re~Sistering garden on the Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih ~ Kobechenonk ~ the Humber River, a project that seeks to re-Indigenize land by creating Three Sisters and medicine earthworks on ancestral urban sites.
MIIJIM: Gardens as Art as Relations
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
February 23, 2021
This roundtable will delve into contemporary artistic and curatorial meditations on working with gardens, plants, seeds, harvesting, and other land-centred practices, both inside and beyond the spatial and temporal confines of art institutions. Moderated by Anishinaabe artist, curator and educator Lisa Myers, the conversation will open with a reflection by her on tending Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Garden works, and will follow with presentations by Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson, scholar and curator Andrea Fatona, curator Crystal Mowry, and artist Christina Battle. This roundtable inquires on radical, reciprocal and sustainable ways of listening, caring, thinking and doing that can flourish from a close attention to the human and more-than-human collaborations involved in these weedy endeavours.
MIIJIM: Carrying Food, Sounds and Memory
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
March 16, 2021
This conversation brings together professor and author Honor Ford-Smith, musician Beny Esguerra, and growers Jacqueline Dwyer and Noel Livingston, founders of Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective, to explore how intergenerational knowledge is immersed in food cultures and carried across borders to Toronto. Through dialogue and improvised performances, the speakers will interweave stories with the multiplicity of rhythms found in Toronto’s diverse communities.What labours of memory sustain the nurturing and transformation of this knowledge across generations? What forces attempt to destroy their significance and with what consequences? This session launches the new project “Oral Histories, Music-making and Food Justice,” an initiative that aims to recover local oral histories of food cultures through contemporary musical and sound explorations, in search of caring acts of intergenerational transfer, collaboration and food justice.
Finding Flowers: Examining Intersections of Art, Ecology and Pedagogy
Presented by CFCS Future of Food Global Dialogue Series
February 11, 2021
Inspired by the late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald, the Finding Flowers project aims to build connections and knowledge about people, land and wildlife by bridging art and science. The loss of pollinators and native landscapes threatens the sustainability of natural ecosystems and the people connected to these natural processes. By focusing on wild pollinators and native plants, Profs Lisa Myers and Sheila Colla will discuss the project’s commitment to understanding nature from diverse perspectives. Various activities of the project include the replanting of Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens across Canada, pollination studies of culturally important medicinal plants, knowledge-sharing events and community science programming, coordinated by Research Associate, Dana Prieto.
On the Wings of a Butterfly:
Discussing the Work of Mike MacDonald, Wild Pollinators, Ecology and Art
Presented by MSVU Art Gallery and Dalhousie Art Gallery as part of Nocturne 2020: Echolocation
October 13, 2020
Join MSVU Art Gallery Director, Laura Ritchie, in conversation with Lindsay Dobbin, Frances Dorsey, Robin Metcalfe, Lisa Myers, and Michelle Sylliboy about the work of late Mi'kmaq artist Mike MacDonald (1941-2006). A Queer media artist, MacDonald is remembered in part for his environmental work planting pollinator gardens across Canada. His 1994 butterfly garden on the Mount Saint Vincent University campus in K'jipuktuk (Halifax) continues to serve as a point of connection between artists and curators exploring ecology and art today.
Wild Pollinators and the Gardens of Mike MacDonald
Presented by Contingencies of Care Residency
June 8, 2020
Sheila Colla, Dana Prieto and Lisa Myers in conversation as they talk on wild pollinators, gardens and Mike MacDonald's butterfly and medicine gardens. Connecting the ecology of our environments to the land we live on and how best to care for it and each other.
Upcoming Events
No upcoming events
Past Events
Reinscribing Land: Mike MacDonald's medicine and butterfly garden
Presented by Entomological Society of Canada and Entomological Society of Ontario
November 2021
More information coming soon.
Mike Macdonald’s Butterfly Garden Panel Discussion
Organized by Art Gallery of Alberta and Ociciwan Collective
July 26, 2021
Mike Macdonald’s Butterfly Garden Panel Discussion was a conversation between Lisa Myers, curator and artist, Becca Taylor, Director of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, and Catherine Crowston, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta. This program looked at the legacy of the late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald whose pollinator gardens continue to inspire and be a space for community contemplation and knowledge sharing.
Beyond the Buzz: Examining Bees Through an Interdisciplinary Lens "Bees, Land & Food Justice"
Organized by Centre for Bee Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
June 4, 2021
Bees, food, land and people are in close relationships which have been altered by past and present capitalist and colonial practices. This panel discussion was joined by Dr Sheila Colla (York University Assistant Professor), Dr Adrianne Lickers Xavier (Acting Director Indigenous Studies Program at MacMaster University), and Dr Sarah Rotz (York University Assistant Professor). Together, they examined the connections between de-colonized and equitable food systems with pollinator conservation.
MIIJIM: Indigenous Food Sovereignties
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
October 6, 2020
This conversation will bring together Secwepemc artist, curator and co-creator of Bush Gallery Tania Willard in conversation with Dawn Morrison (Secwepemc), Founder and Research Curator of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, and Mi’kmaw professor and Indigenous land and food justice advocate Sherry Pictou, to consider their work in defence of Indigenous sovereignties, and in relation to the reclamation of land, medicines, foods and plants. This conversation was opened by York University’s elder Amy Desjarlais.
MIIJIM: Indigenous and Black Food Relations
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
October 20, 2020
This conversation opens up the decades of work by Cree scholar Dr. Priscilla Settee in Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Leticia Ama Deawuo’s work at Black Creek Community Farm and her personal research on food history connecting with her grandmother and African Indigenous foods. The speakers will discuss the intersections of climate change and food injustice and its effects on Black and Indigenous people, while sharing the strengths of working in solidarity across communities.
MIIJIM: Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Food Systems
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
November 10, 2020
Considering that food systems are specific to cultures, nations and territories, this conversation brings together medicine and food scholars Joe Pitawanakwat from Wikwemikong First Nation, William Kingfisher from Rama First Nation and Chandra Maracle from Six Nations of the Grand River, to consider this specificity and to add nuance and complexity to the potentially flattening term “Indigenous food system.”
MIIJIM: Migrant Workers and Food Justice
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
November 24, 2020
This conversation is grounded in artistic practices that raise important considerations of labour and living conditions of those workers who grow the food that fills the grocery stores. We will bring together activist and advocate Evelyn Encalada, and workers rights organizer and community artist Tzazna Maranda to consider their calls to action through art and activism.
MIIJIM: Food and Gardens as Remediation
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
February 2, 2021
This conversation brings together Indigenous artists who are using seeds, planting and cultivation in their practices. T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss (Skwxwú7mesh / Stó:lō / Hawaiian / Swiss) and Anne Riley (Cree / Dene) will discuss A Constellation of Remediation, a project that includes the planting of Indigenous remediation gardens on vacant and untended lots on the unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəyə̓m (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Cease and Anne will be in conversation with Joce Two Crows Tremblay (Mohawk / Pottawatomi / Francaise / Ashkenazi), an artist, Earthworker and member of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, who will be sharing their work with the Re~Sistering garden on the Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih ~ Kobechenonk ~ the Humber River, a project that seeks to re-Indigenize land by creating Three Sisters and medicine earthworks on ancestral urban sites.
MIIJIM: Gardens as Art as Relations
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
February 23, 2021
This roundtable will delve into contemporary artistic and curatorial meditations on working with gardens, plants, seeds, harvesting, and other land-centred practices, both inside and beyond the spatial and temporal confines of art institutions. Moderated by Anishinaabe artist, curator and educator Lisa Myers, the conversation will open with a reflection by her on tending Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Garden works, and will follow with presentations by Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson, scholar and curator Andrea Fatona, curator Crystal Mowry, and artist Christina Battle. This roundtable inquires on radical, reciprocal and sustainable ways of listening, caring, thinking and doing that can flourish from a close attention to the human and more-than-human collaborations involved in these weedy endeavours.
MIIJIM: Carrying Food, Sounds and Memory
Organized by Finding Flowers Project
March 16, 2021
This conversation brings together professor and author Honor Ford-Smith, musician Beny Esguerra, and growers Jacqueline Dwyer and Noel Livingston, founders of Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective, to explore how intergenerational knowledge is immersed in food cultures and carried across borders to Toronto. Through dialogue and improvised performances, the speakers will interweave stories with the multiplicity of rhythms found in Toronto’s diverse communities.What labours of memory sustain the nurturing and transformation of this knowledge across generations? What forces attempt to destroy their significance and with what consequences? This session launches the new project “Oral Histories, Music-making and Food Justice,” an initiative that aims to recover local oral histories of food cultures through contemporary musical and sound explorations, in search of caring acts of intergenerational transfer, collaboration and food justice.
Finding Flowers: Examining Intersections of Art, Ecology and Pedagogy
Presented by CFCS Future of Food Global Dialogue Series
February 11, 2021
Inspired by the late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald, the Finding Flowers project aims to build connections and knowledge about people, land and wildlife by bridging art and science. The loss of pollinators and native landscapes threatens the sustainability of natural ecosystems and the people connected to these natural processes. By focusing on wild pollinators and native plants, Profs Lisa Myers and Sheila Colla will discuss the project’s commitment to understanding nature from diverse perspectives. Various activities of the project include the replanting of Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens across Canada, pollination studies of culturally important medicinal plants, knowledge-sharing events and community science programming, coordinated by Research Associate, Dana Prieto.
On the Wings of a Butterfly:
Discussing the Work of Mike MacDonald, Wild Pollinators, Ecology and Art
Presented by MSVU Art Gallery and Dalhousie Art Gallery as part of Nocturne 2020: Echolocation
October 13, 2020
Join MSVU Art Gallery Director, Laura Ritchie, in conversation with Lindsay Dobbin, Frances Dorsey, Robin Metcalfe, Lisa Myers, and Michelle Sylliboy about the work of late Mi'kmaq artist Mike MacDonald (1941-2006). A Queer media artist, MacDonald is remembered in part for his environmental work planting pollinator gardens across Canada. His 1994 butterfly garden on the Mount Saint Vincent University campus in K'jipuktuk (Halifax) continues to serve as a point of connection between artists and curators exploring ecology and art today.
Wild Pollinators and the Gardens of Mike MacDonald
Presented by Contingencies of Care Residency
June 8, 2020
Sheila Colla, Dana Prieto and Lisa Myers in conversation as they talk on wild pollinators, gardens and Mike MacDonald's butterfly and medicine gardens. Connecting the ecology of our environments to the land we live on and how best to care for it and each other.